He's 'Hooked' on Old Steam Tractors

Sent in by Ennis Sterner, Agency, Iowa 52530-and with the kind
permission of The Register and Tribune newspaper of Des Moines,
Iowa. We thank you Ed Heins, managing editor for allowing us to use
picture and story.

MT. PLEASANT, IA.

Among the steam engines on hand for the annual Midwest Old
Settlers and Threshers Reunion here last week was a 1914 J.I. Case
20-40.

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With the exception clicking noise in the oil pump, the old
Case still runs about as quietly as it did 54 years ago.

At the throttle was Ennis 'Yampy' Sterner of Agency, who
bought the Case engine and a Case separator in 1914 and threshed
with the 'rig' until 1942 'when the combines came
in.'

'Never ran a combine,' he says. 'Never had no desire
to after running a threshing machine.'

'Yampy' is 79 years old. And like the 54-year-old steam
engine, he is in remarkably good condition.

He is wearing an engineer's cap, blue denim overalls and a
matching jacket, and a red handkerchief around his neck. There are
spots of black grease and flecks of coal soot en his face.

He opens a valve just under the reverse lever on the Case and a
jet of steam spews out over the iron spokes of the left rear
wheel.

'There's something about a steam engine,' he tells a
visitor. 'It's pretty near human.

Yampy remembers the days when 'steam was king.'

'We used to start about four in the morning grease the b e a
r i n g s , clinker the grates and swab the flues. It took about
three hours to get fired up and ready to go. We'd start
threshing about seven o'clock.

'We'd thresh 2,000 to 2,500 bushels of oats a day. Got
three cents a bushel for threshing oats and a nickel for wheat.

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'It was a dog's life, but it was fascinating. I liked
it.

'I remember one night we didn't start moving to the next
farm until late in the evening. By the time we got there it was two
o'clock in the morning and everybody was in bed.

'We left the rig next to the barn and crawled up in the barn
loft to sleep.

'A mouse run up my water boy's pants leg. God, he let
out a yell. Woke up all the roosters on the farm and they
didn't stop crowing until sunup.

'When we? were threshing, I spent most of my time on the
engine. Lord, I don't know how many hours I've spent on
that platform.

'You have to watch the water level pretty close. If you get
too much water in the boiler, it starts through the cylinder.

'That's called priming the cylinder. And when it primes,
you don't have no power.